Amphibious off-road vehicles are all-terrain vehicles with hulls or watertight underbodies that are capable of traveling over land or water. Amphibious off-road vehicles are popular both as recreational vehicles, e.g. for hunters, fishermen and outdoorsmen, and as utility vehicles, e.g. for military and industrial applications.
For example, the ARGO which is manufactured by Ontario Drive and Gear Ltd. (220 Bergey Court, New Hamburg, Ontario, Canada, www.argoatv.com) is an amphibious off-road vehicle. The ARGO is currently available in a 6-wheel-drive version (6×6) and an 8-wheel-drive version (8×8). While the ARGO is adept on land, it is much less maneuverable in water.
In contrast, an air boat, with its flat-bottomed hull and air propeller, is specially designed to navigate through shallow swamps and marshes, or other bodies of water including frozen lakes or rivers. However, the air boat, unless of the hovercraft variety, is unsuited to travel over land.
A number of different designs for articulated amphibious vehicles are known in the art, such as, for example, those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,072,203 (Pierson) entitled “Small, Personal, All Terrain Vehicle”, U.S. Pat. No. 5,113,958 (Holden) entitled “Snow Travel Vehicle”, PCT Patent Application Publication WO 99/24272 (Francatel) entitled “Amphibious Cross-Country Vehicle In Two Articulated Parts, Whereof The Front Is The Steering Part”, U.S. Pat. No. 4,645,023 (Rea et al.) entitled “All Terrain Vehicle and Method Of Operating Same”, and European Patent Application EP 1 000 778 (Bellezza) entitled “Amphibious Vehicle With Articulated Sections”. However, none of these various vehicles are particularly well-suited to traveling over both land and water, or through a wide variety of other environments such as swamps, bogs, marshes, ice and snow.
Therefore, it would be highly desirable to provide a vehicle capable of traveling over a wide variety of different environments, such as over water, snow, ice, marshes, bogs, swamps and dry land.